This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been

fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/LCOMM.2015.2443092, IEEE Communications Letters
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. X, MONTH 2015 1

PAPR Reduction of SC-FDMA Signals Using Optimized

Additive Pre-distortion
Kun Wu, Guangliang Ren, Member, IEEE, and Maixin Yu

Abstract—One challenge of employing high-order modulations pre-distortion vector to the pre-processed SC-FDMA symbol
in single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) to modify the few modulated symbols causing the large peak.
systems is the resultant high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). This pre-distortion vector is optimized to minimize the in-
We propose a novel PAPR reduction scheme by jointly consider-
ing the PAPR reduction and the incurred bit error rate (BER) band distortion which directly affects the BER performance,
degradation for SC-FDMA systems with high-order modulations. under the expected PAPR constraint. Simulations show that
In the proposed scheme, an additive pre-distortion vector is the proposed scheme can achieve the desired PAPR reduction
introduced to modify the few modulated symbols causing the peak with negligible BER performance degradation compared with
of the SC-FDMA signal. This pre-distortion vector is optimized conventional SC-FDMA systems. In addition, it is implement-
to minimize the in-band distortion under the expected PAPR
constraint. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed ed with low complexity and no excess bandwidth, making it
scheme can achieve the desired PAPR reduction with negligible both energy and spectrum efficient.
BER performance degradation.
Index Terms—Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), single II. S YSTEM M ODEL
carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA), high- We study the PAPR reduction of LFDMA signals adopted
order modulation. in LTE uplink [1]. In an SC-FDMA subframe, the total N
subcarriers of each data symbol are divided into several non-
I. I NTRODUCTION overlap bands, and each user occupies a unique one. Here, we
HE long term evolution (LTE) uplink has adopted the focus on a specific user with M subcarriers (M < N ).
T single carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-
FDMA) which has low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR)
T
The data d = [d0 , d1 , ..., dM −1 ] in each symbol is first fed
to an M -point normalized discrete Fourier transform (DFT),
T
[1]. With the evolution from 4G to 5G, in the promising small yielding the frequency domain data X = [X0 , X1 , ..., XM −1 ]
cells where the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be very high, as
M −1
high-order modulations are preferred to achieve higher spectral 1 ∑
dm e−j M , 0 ≤ k ≤ M − 1,
2πkm
Xk = √ (1)
efficiencies [2]. However, high-order modulations will cause a M m=0
high PAPR of SC-FDMA signals, especially localized FDMA
(LFDMA) [3]-[5]. The high PAPR leads to low efficiency of where [·]T is the transpose. For LFDMA, the elements of X are
the high-power amplifier (HPA) [6], which fails to meet the mapped to M contiguous subcarriers with frequency indices
5G requirements in energy efficiency [7]. {fk |fk = f0+k, 0 ≤ fk ≤ N−1, k = 0, 1, ..., M −1}, where f0 is
Several proposals have been studied in the literature for the starting index regulated by the system. For simplicity and
PAPR reduction of SC-FDMA signals, such as selected map- without loss of generality, f0 = 0 is assumed so that fk = k.
ping (SLM) [8], partial transmit sequence (PTS) [9], and After being zero-padded and an N -point normalized inverse
pulse shaping methods [10]-[12]. These techniques work either DFT (IDFT) of X, the transmitted signal is given by
M −1
1 ∑
with high complexity or excess bandwidth. Recently, Ji et al.
2πkn
presented a PAPR reduction method (called JPRM) in [5] for xn = √ Xk ej N , 0 ≤ n ≤ N − 1. (2)
coded SC-FDMA systems via introducing few error bits. How- N k=0
ever, this method only focuses on the PAPR reduction without Substituting (1) into (2), we obtain
minimization of the introduced error bits which deteriorate the M −1 ( )
error correcting capacity of the system, thus leading to a bit 1 ∑ N
xn = √ dm g n − m , (3)
error rate (BER) error floor. M m=0 M
In this letter, we propose a novel PAPR reduction scheme for
SC-FDMA systems by jointly considering the PAPR reduction where the pulse function g(n) is given by
/
and the incurred BER degradation. The key point is to add a 1 π(M −1)n πM n πn
g (n) = √ ej N sin sin . (4)
Manuscript received April 14, 2015; revised May 22, 2015; accepted June N N N
5, 2015. Date of publication June xx, 2015; date of current version Month Accordingly, the PAPR of the time domain transmitted signal
xx, 2015. This work was supported in part by the National Basic Research T
Program of China (973 Program, 2014CB340205) and the National Natural x = [x0 , x1 ..., xN −1 ] is defined as
Science Foundation of China (61072102). The associate editor coordinating 2
the review of this paper and approving it for publication was I. B. Djordjevic. max |xn |
0≤n≤N−1
The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of ISN, Xidian University, PAPR(x) = { } . (5)
2
Xi’an 710071, China (e-mail: wk 0100@163.com). E |xn |
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2015.xxxxxxx

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/LCOMM.2015.2443092, IEEE Communications Letters
2 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. X, MONTH 2015

III. P ROPOSED S CHEME FOR PAPR R EDUCTION ( ( ))

s.t. c(i) = IDFTN DFTM C(i) (9b)
Notice that the peak sample makes a major contribution  2
to the PAPR, hence we focus on reducing the large peak to  (i−1) (i) 
xnmax +cnmax 
implement PAPR reduction. / ≤ γ, (9c)
From (3), we note that the SC-FDMA signal is a summation x(i−1) +c(i) 2 N
2
of pulses weighted by the data symbols. When two successive
symbols are the outer constellation points with anti-phase, where ∥·∥2 denotes the ℓ2 -norm.
the two related pulses are almost coherently added at the The optimization problem in (9) is non-convex since the
intersection of their main lobes so that the large peak occurs constraint
(9c) is non-convex
[13].
2 Nevertheless, approximat-
ing x(i−1) +c(i) 2 by x(i−1) 2 , the constraint (9c) turns
2
[5]. Thus, by modifying both, or one, symbols, we can break 2 2
this coherent addition so that the large peak is reduced. In [5], convex. Considering E (i−1) = d(i−1) 2 = x(i−1) 2 which
Ji et al. simply replace the one with the larger magnitude of is obtained by the M -point normalized DFT and the N -point
the two symbols with an inner constellation point. However, normalized IDFT, the problem (9) is converted to
a BER error floor occurs since only PAPR reduction is (i) 2
C
considered without minimizing the introduced error bits. min 2
EVM = (i−1)2 (10a)
To tackle this problem, we propose a novel PAPR reduction C(i) ∈CM E
( ( ))
scheme by jointly considering the PAPR reduction and the s.t. c(i) = IDFTN DFTM C(i) (10b)
incurred BER degradation. The proposed scheme iteratively
 
modifies the two modulated symbols causing the large peak  (i−1) (i) 2 γ (i−1)
xnmax +cnmax  ≤ E . (10c)
by adding a pre-distortion vector to the data vector at the N
input of the M -point DFT precoder. In each iteration, this ( )
The Lagrange function for (10), denoted as L C(i) , λ , is
pre-distortion vector is optimized to minimize the in-band given by
distortion which directly affects the BER performance, under (  )
( ) C(i) 2
the desired PAPR constraint.  (i−1) (i) 2 γ (i−1)
Specifically, in the ith iteration, the PAPR of the time L C , λ = (i−1) +λ xnmax +cnmax  − E
(i) 2
E N
domain signal x(i−1) ∈ CN after the (i−1)th iteration is firstly (i) 2 (
C  1
obtained by (5), where C is the complex domain. If it is no = 2
+λ x(i−1)
nmax + √
bigger than the predefined PAPR threshold γ, the process is E (i−1) M
 
complete and we get the final output signal. Otherwise, find ∑ ( )2
the two symbols causing the maximum peak of x(i−1) and the (i) N  γ 
· Ck g nmax −k − E (i−1) ,
associated indices are obtained as [5] M  N
k=m1 ,m2

m1 = ⌈nmax /(N /M )⌉ , m2 = ((m1 + 1))M , (6) (11)

where ⌈·⌉ is the ceiling function, ((·))M is the cyclic shift in where λ is the Lagrange multiplier. The solution to (10) can be
the base of M , and nmax is the index of the maximum peak obtained by the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions [14]:
of x(i−1) , which is found by  ( )
{ }  ∂L C(i) , λ

 = 0, k = m1 , m2 (12a)
x(i−1) 
 (i)
nmax = arg max 
 ∂Ck
n=0,...,N−1 
  
{ ( ( ))} 
  ( )2
IDFTN DFTM d(i−1)  
  (i−1) ∑ N 
= arg max , (7) 
 √
1 (i)
 λ  x + C g n −k
M 
n=0,...,N−1

  nmax k max

  M k=m1 ,m2
where d(i−1) ∈ CM is the data vector at the input of the M - 

 γ
point DFT precoder after the (i−1)th iteration, IDFTN (·) and −λ E (i−1) = 0 (12b)
DFTM (·) are the N -point normalized IDFT and the M -point 
  N

  
normalized DFT, respectively. Next, a pre-distortion vector 
  ∑ ( )2

  1 N 
C(i) ∈ CM , whose elements are all zeros except Cm1 and
(i)

  xnmax + √
(i−1) (i)
Ck g nmax −k 

  M 
(i)
Cm2 , is added to d (i−1)
for the peak reduction of x (i−1)
after 
  M 


k=m1 ,m2
being optimized, thereby resulting in a modified data vector 



γ
− E (i−1) ≤ 0

 (12c)
d(i) = d(i−1) +C(i) . (8)  N
λ ≥ 0. (12d)
For the optimization of C(i) , we use error vector magnitude
Solving the KKT conditions in (12), the optimal C(i) of (10)
(EVM) to describe the in-band distortion [13], so that the
is written as
optimal design of C(i) is to minimize the EVM of the current  (  ) ( )
 E√(i−1) γ (i−1)  (i−1)  ∗
SC-FDMA symbol with the PAPR constraint of γ and the  E − x max  g nmax − kN

 (i) M N n M jφ
(i−1)
pre-distortion vector design problem is formulated as  Ck =  ( )2  ( )2 e 0 ,
(i) 2 g nmax − m 1 N  + g nmax − m 2 N 
C 

M M

min 2
EVM = 2 
 k = m 1 , m2 (13a)
C(i) ∈CM d(i−1) 2
(9a)  (i)
2 Ck = 0, 0 ≤ k < M, k ̸= m1 , m2 , (13b)

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
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WU et al.: PAPR REDUCTION OF SC-FDMA SIGNALS USING OPTIMIZED ADDITIVE PRE-DISTORTION 3

where (·)∗ is the complex conjugate and φ0

(i−1)
is the phase
(i−1) 10 0
of xnmax . Then, the output signal x(i) can be updated as
∑ ( )
1 (i) N
xn = xn + √
(i) (i−1)
Ck g n−k , 0 ≤ n ≤ N −1. 10 -1
M k=m1 ,m2 M
(14)

Pr(PAPR>PAPR )
0
The detailed steps of the proposed scheme are summarized 10 -2

in Algorithm 1.
10 -3
Algorithm 1 Proposed PAPR reduction algorithm.
1: Initialization Conventional SC-FDMA
• Set the PAPR threshold γ and the maximum iteration 10 -4 Proposed (γ = 6.5 dB)
Proposed (γ = 7.5 dB)
number K. JPRM (γ = 6.5 dB)
(0)
• Set i = 1 and x = x. JPRM (γ = 7.5 dB)
10 -5
2: for i ≤ K do 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
PAPR (dB)
3: Evaluate the PAPR of x(i−1) using (5). 0

4: if PAPR(x(i−1) ) > γ then Fig. 1. PAPR reduction performance of the proposed scheme and JPRM for
5: Determine nmax , m1 , and m2 using (7) and (6). 16-QAM.
6: Calculate the optimal C(i) with (13) and update the
transmitting signal x(i) by (14).
7: else 10 0

8: break.
9: end if 10 -1
10: i = i + 1.
11: end for
Pr(PAPR>PAPR )
0

10 -2

Note that in an SC-FDMA subframe, we perform Algorith-

m 1 for every data symbol. With respect to the conventional
SC-FDMA system, the additional complexity mainly lies in
(5), (13), and (14) which require complex multiplications
(CMs), complex additions (CAs), and the | · |2 operation. In
(5), at most KN |·|2 are needed and at most 2K|·|2 , 2K CMs
are required for (13). In (14), at most 2KN CMs, 2KN CAs
are needed for signal updating. Obviously, a CM means four
real multiplications (RMs) and two real additions (RAs), a CA
equals two RAs, and | · |2 represents two RMs and one RA.
So the additional complexity of the proposed scheme for each
data symbol is at most 10KN+12K RMs and 9KN+6K RAs,
while that of JPRM is at most 6KN+4K RMs and 5KN+4K
RAs [5]. Both SLM and PTS have a very high complexity
[6], taking SLM for example, the additional complexity is
2N (U − 1)log2 N + 2U N RMs and 3N (U − 1)log2 N + U N
RAs, where U is the number of candidate phase vectors. Pulse
shaping methods cost additional 4(1+β)M RMs and 2(1+β)M
RAs [11], where β(0 < β < 1) is the excess bandwidth ratio.
It can be seen that the complexity of the proposed scheme is
comparable to that of JPRM, but much lower than that of SLM
since K < U . Also, both JPRM and the proposed scheme have
a slightly higher complexity than pulse shaping methods, but
they consume no excess bandwidth while the latter do.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified via
computer simulations in SC-FDMA systems with 16-QAM
and 64-QAM, respectively. JPRM in [5] is also experimented
for comparison. The numbers of total and allocated subcarriers
in each SC-FDMA symbol are set to N = 1024 and M = 72,
10 -3
Conventional SC-FDMA
10 -4 Proposed (γ = 6.5 dB)
Proposed (γ = 7.5 dB)
JPRM (γ = 6.5 dB)
JPRM (γ = 7.5 dB)
10 -5
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
PAPR (dB)
0
Fig. 2. PAPR reduction performance of the proposed scheme and JPRM for
64-QAM.
respectively, with the subcarrier space ∆f = 15 KHz. The data
bits are channel coded with the convolutional code of code rate
R = 3/4. Both JPRM and our method are evaluated with the
maximum iteration K = 3 for PAPR thresholds γ = 6.5 dB and
7.5 dB. The 3GPP microcell channel model [15] is employed
for BER performance evaluation.
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show the PAPR reduction performance
comparison in terms of the complementary cumulative distri-
bution function (CCDF) of the PAPR for 16-QAM and 64-
QAM, respectively. It is seen from both figures that, CCDF
curves of the proposed scheme overlap with those of the
conventional SC-FDMA signal for PAPR0 < γ. While for
PAPR0 > γ, the proposed algorithm works and iteratively
makes the PAPR approach the threshold by reducing the peaks,
therefore, the CCDF curves drop sharply around γ. From Fig.
1, it is observed that for 16-QAM, the PAPR reduction of
the proposed scheme with γ = 6.5 dB and 7.5 dB over the
conventional SC-FDMA signal are 2.0 dB and 1.65 dB at

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
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4 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. X, MONTH 2015

in both figures, JPRM has a severe BER error floor at SNRs

10 0
above 35 dB and performs much worse than the proposed
scheme, especially for smaller γ and higher order modulations.
10 -1 The superiority of the proposed scheme in BER performance
over JPRM is due to the fact that JPRM only considers the
PAPR reduction without minimizing the introduced error bits,
10 -2 while the proposed scheme takes care of both aspects via the
optimization of the pre-distortion vector.
BER

10 -3
V. C ONCLUSION
Conventional SC-FDMA We have proposed a novel PAPR reduction scheme for SC-
10 -4 Proposed (γ = 6.5 dB) FDMA systems. An additive pre-distortion vector is introduced
Proposed (γ = 7.5 dB)
JPRM (γ = 6.5 dB) to modify the few modulated symbols causing the peak of the
JPRM (γ = 7.5 dB) SC-FDMA signal. Via the optimal design of the pre-distortion
10 -5 vector, the proposed scheme can achieve the desired PAPR re-
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
SNR (dB) duction with negligible BER performance degradation, making
it rather attractive for practical SC-FDMA systems, especially
Fig. 3. BER performance of the proposed scheme and JPRM for 16-QAM. those with high-order modulations.

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